KEY WORDS, PROBLEM WORDS, WORDS I LOVE

Date:
March 6, 1988, Sunday, Late City Final Edition
Section 7; Page 1, Column 1; Book Review Desk
Byline:MILANKUNDERA; MilanKundera, born in Czechoslovakia, has lived in France since 1975. He is the author of ''The Joke,'' ''The Farewell Party'' and
''The Unbearable Lightness of Being,'' among other novels, and ''Jacques and His Master,'' a play.
Lead:
LEAD: In 1968 and 1969, ''The Joke'' was translated into all the Western languages. But what surprises!
Text:

In 1968 and 1969, ''The Joke'' was translated into all the Western languages. But what surprises!

In France, the translator rewrote the novel by ornamenting my style. In England, the publisher cut out all the reflective passages, eliminated the musicological chapters, changed the order of the parts, recomposed the novel. Another country: I meet my
translator, a man who knows not a word of Czech. ''Then how did you translate it?'' ''With my heart.'' And he pulls a photo of me from his wallet. He was so congenial that I almost believed it
was actually possible to translate by some telepathy of the heart. Of course, it turned out to be much simpler: he had worked from the French rewrite, as had the translator in Argentina. For me, because practically speaking I no longer
have the Czech audience, translations are everything. I therefore decided, a few years ago, to put some order into the foreign editions of my books. This involved a certain amount of conflict and fatigue: reading, checking, correcting
my novels, old and new, in the three or four foreign languages I can read, completely took over a whole period of my life.

The writer who determines to supervise the translations of his books finds himself chasing after hordes of words like a shepherd after a flock of wild sheep - a sorry figure to himself, a laughable one to others. I suspect that my friend Pierre Nora,
editor of the magazine Le Debat, recognized the sadly comical quality of my shepherd existence. One day, with barely disguised compassion, he told me: ''Look, forget this torture, and instead write something for me. The translations
have forced you to think about every one of your words. So write your own personal dictionary. A dictionary for your novels. Put down your key words, your problem words, the words you love.''

Well, here it is. APHORISM. From the Greek word aphorismos, meaning ''definition.'' Aphorism: poetic form of definition. (See: DEFINITION.) BEAUTY (and knowledge). Those who, in the spirit of Hermann Broch, declare knowledge to be
the novel's sole morality are betrayed by the metallic aura of ''knowledge,'' a word too much compromised by its links with the sciences. So we have to add: Whatever aspects of existence the novel discovers,
it discovers as the beautiful. The earliest novelists discovered adventure. Thanks to them we find adventure itself beautiful and are in love with it. Kafka described man in a situation of tragic entrapment. Kafkologists used to debate
at length whether their author granted us any hope. No, not hope. Something else. Even that life-denying situation is revealed by Kafka as a strange, dark beauty. Beauty, the last triumph possible for man who can no longer hope. Beauty
in art: the suddenly kindled light of the never-before-said. This light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man, and thus the novelists' discoveries, however
old they may be, will never cease to astonish us. BEING. Many friends advised me against the title ''The Unbearable Lightness of Being.'' Couldn't I at least cut out the word ''being''?
This word makes everyone uncomfortable. When they come across it, translators tend to substitute more modest expressions: ''existence,'' ''life,'' ''condition'' . . . There
was a Czech translator who decided to update Shakespeare: ''To live or not to live. . . .'' But it's precisely in that famous soliloquy that the difference between living and being is made clear: if after death
we go on dreaming, if after death there still is something, then death (nonlife) does not free us of the horror of being. Hamlet raises the question of being, not of life. The horror of being: ''Death has two faces. One is
nonbeing; the other is the terrifying material being of the corpse'' (''The Book of Laughter and Forgetting''). CENTRAL EUROPE. Seventeenth century: The enormous force of the baroque imposes a certain
cultural unity on the region, which is multinational and thus polycentric, with its shifting and indefinable boundaries. The lingering shadow of baroque Catholicism persists there into the 18th century: no Voltaire, no Fielding. In
the hierarchy of the arts, music stands at the top. From Haydn on (and up through Schoenberg and Bartok) the center of gravity of European music is there. Nineteenth century: A few great poets, but no Flaubert; the Biedermeier spirit:
the veil of the idyllic draped over the real. In the 20th century, revolt. The greatest minds (Freud, the novelists) revalidate what for centuries was ill known and unknown: rational and demystifying lucidity; a sense of the real;
the novel. Their revolt is the exact opposite of French modernism's, which is antirationalist, antirealist, lyrical (this will cause a good many misunderstandings). The pleiad of great Central European novelists: Kafka, Hasek,
Musil, Broch, Gombrowicz: their aversion to romanticism; their love for the pre-Balzac novel and for the libertine spirit (Broch interpreting kitsch as a plot by monogamous puritanism against the Enlightenment); their mistrust of History
and of the glorification of the future; their modernism, which has nothing to do with the avant-garde's illusions.

The destruction of the Hapsburg empire, and then, after 1945, Austria's cultural marginality and the political nonexistence of the other countries, make Central Europe a premonitory mirror showing the possible fate of all of Europe. Central Europe:
a laboratory of twilight. COMIC. By providing us with the lovely illusion of human greatness, the tragic brings us consolation. The comic is crueler: it brutally reveals the meaninglessness of everything. I suppose all things human
have their comic aspect, which in certain cases is recognized, acknowledged, utilized, and in others is veiled. The real geniuses of the comic are not those who make us laugh hardest but those who reveal some unknown realm of the comic.
History has always been considered an exclusively serious territory. But there is the undiscovered comic side to history. Just as there is the (hard-to-take) comic side to sexuality. DEFINITION. The novel's meditative texture
is supported by the armature of a few abstract terms. If I hope to avoid falling into the slough where everyone thinks he understands everything without understanding anything, not only must I select those terms with utter precision,
but I must define and redefine them. A novel is often, it seems to me, nothing but a long quest for some elusive definitions. ELITISM. The word ''elitism'' only appeared in France in 1967, the word ''elitist''
not until 1968. For the first time in history, the very language threw a glare of negativity, even of mistrust, on the notion of elite.

Official propaganda in the Communist countries began to pummel elitism and elitists at that same time. It used the terms to designate not captains of industry or famous athletes or politicians but only the cultural elite: philosophers, writers, professors,
historians, figures in film and the theater.

An amazing synchronism. It seems that in the whole of Europe the cultural elite is yielding to other elites. Over there, to the elite of the police apparatus. Here, to the elite of the mass media apparatus. No one will ever accuse these new elites of
elitism. Thus the word ''elitism'' will soon be forgotten. (See: EUROPE.) EUROPE. In the Middle Ages, European unity rested on the common religion. In the Modern Era, religion yielded its position to culture (to
cultural creation), which came to embody the supreme values by which Europeans recognized themselves, defined and identified themselves. Now, in our own time, culture is in turn yielding its position. But to what and to whom? What
sphere will provide the sort of supreme values that could unify Europe? Technology? The marketplace? Politics involving the democratic ideal, the principle of tolerance? But if that tolerance no longer has any rich creativity or any
powerful thought to protect, will it not become empty and useless? Or can we take culture's abdication as a kind of deliverance, to be welcomed euphorically? I don't know. I merely believe I know that culture has already
yielded. And thus the image of European unity slips away into the past. European: one who is nostalgic for Europe. EXCITEMENT. Not pleasure or climax or emotion or passion. Excitement is the basis of eroticism, its deepest enigma,
its key term. FLOW. In one of his letters, Chopin describes his stay in England. He plays in the salons, and the ladies always use the same term to express their delight: ''Ah, how beautiful! If flows like water!''
Chopin found it exasperating, as I do when I hear a translation praised in the same terms: ''It really flows.'' Partisans of ''flowing'' translation often object to my translators: ''That's
not the way to say it in German (in English, in Spanish, etc.)!'' I reply: ''It's not the way to say it in Czech either!'' My dear Italian publisher, Roberto Calasso, declares: ''The mark
of a good translation is not its fluency but rather all those unusual and original formulations [ ''not the way to say it'' ] that the translator has been bold enough to preserve and defend.'' Including
unaccustomed punctuation. I once left a publisher for the sole reason that he tried to change my semicolons to periods. FORGETTING. ''The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.''
That remark by Mirek, a character in ''The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,'' is often cited as the book's message. This is because the first thing a reader recognizes in a novel is the ''already
known.'' The ''already known'' in that novel is Orwell's famous theme: the forgetting that a totalitarian regime imposes. But to me the originality of Mirek's story lay somewhere else entirely.
This Mirek who is struggling with all his might to make sure he is not forgotten (he and his friends and their political battle) is at the same time doing his utmost to make people forget another person (his ex-mistress, whom he's
ashamed of). Before it becomes a political issue, the will to forget is an anthropological one: man has always harbored the desire to rewrite his own biography, to change the past, to wipe out tracks, both his own and others'.
The will to forget is very different from a simple temptation to deceive. Sabina has no reason to hide anything at all, yet she feels driven by the irrational urge to make people forget about her. Forgetting: absolute injustice and
absolute solace at the same time. The novelistic exploration of the theme of forgetting has no end and no conclusion. IDEAS. My disgust for those who reduce a work to its ideas. My revulsion at being dragged into what they call ''discussion
of ideas.'' My despair at this era befogged with ideas and indifferent to works. INEXPERIENCE. The original title considered for ''The Unbearable Lightness of Being'': ''The Planet of Inexperience.''
Inexperience as a quality of the human condition. We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we've gained from a previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry
without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don't know what it is we're heading for: the old are innocent children of their old age. In that sense, man's world is the planet of inexperience.
INTERVIEW. Cursed be the writer who first allowed a journalist to reproduce his remarks freely! He started the process that can only lead to the disappearance of the writer: he who is responsible for every one of his words. Yet I do
very much like the dialogue (a major literary form), and I've been pleased with several such discussions that were mutually pondered, composed and edited. Alas, the interview as it is generally practiced has nothing to do with
a dialogue: (1) the interviewer asks questions of interest to him, of no interest to you; (2) of your responses, he uses only those that suit him; (3) he translates them into his own vocabulary, his own manner of thought. In imitation
of American journalism, he will not even deign to get your approval for what he has you say. The interview appears. You console yourself: people will quickly forget it! Not at all: people will quote it! Even the most scrupulous academics
no longer distinguish between the words a writer has written and signed, and his remarks as reported. In July 1985, I made a firm decision: no more interviews. Except for dialogues co-edited by me, accompanied by my copyright, all
my reported remarks since then are to be considered forgeries. IRONY. Which is right and which is wrong? Is Emma Bovary intolerable? Or brave and touching? And what about Werther? Is he sensitive and noble? Or an aggressive sentimentalist,
infatuated with himself? The more attentively we read a novel, the more impossible the answer, because the novel is, by definition, the ironic art: its ''truth'' is concealed, undeclared, undeclarable. ''Remember,
Razumov, that women, children, and revolutionists hate irony, which is the negation of all saving instincts, of all faith, of all devotion, of all action,'' says a Russian woman revolutionary in Joseph Conrad's ''Under
Western Eyes.'' Irony irritates. Not because it mocks or attacks but because it denies us our certainties by unmasking the world as an ambiguity. Leonardo Sciascia: ''There is nothing harder to understand, more
indecipherable than irony.'' It is futile to try and make a novel ''difficult'' through stylistic affectation; any novel worth the name, however limpid it may be, is difficult enough by reason of its consubstantial
irony. KITSCH. In the course of writing ''The Unbearable Lightness of Being,'' I was a little uncomfortable at having made the word ''kitsch'' one of the pillar-words of the novel. Indeed, even
recently, the term was nearly unknown in France, or known only in a very impoverished sense. In the French version of Hermann Broch's celebrated essay, the word ''kitsch'' is translated as ''junk
art'' (art de pacotille). A misinterpretation, for Broch demonstrates that kitsch is something other than simply a work in poor taste. There is a kitsch attitude. Kitsch behavior. The kitsch-man's (Kitschmensch) need
for kitsch: it is the need to gaze into the mirror of the beautifying lie and to be moved to tears of gratification at one's own reflection. For Broch, kitsch is historically bound to the sentimental romanticism of the 19th century.
Because in Germany and Central Europe the 19th century was far more romantic (and far less realistic) than elsewhere, it was there that kitsch flowered to excess, it is there that the word ''kitsch'' was born, there
that it is still in common use. In Prague, we saw kitsch as art's prime enemy. Not in France. For the French, the opposite of real art is entertainment. The opposite of serious art is light, minor art. But for my part, I never
minded Agatha Christie's detective novels. Whereas Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Horowitz at the piano, the big Hollywood films like ''Kramer vs. Kramer,'' ''Doctor Zhivago'' (poor Pasternak!)
- those I detest, deeply, sincerely. And I am more and more irritated by the kitsch spirit in certain works whose form pretends to modernism. (I add: Nietzsche's hatred for Victor Hugo's ''pretty words''
and ''ceremonial dress'' was a disgust for kitsch avant la lettre.) LAUGHTER (European). For Rabelais, the merry and the comic were still one and the same. In the 18th century, the humor of Sterne and Diderot is
an affectionate, nostalgic recollection of Rabelaisian merriment. In the 19th century, Gogol is a melancholy humorist: ''The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes,'' said he.
Europe has looked for such a long time at the funny story of its own existence that in the 20th century, Rabelais's merry epic has turned into the despairing comedy of Ionesco, who says, ''There's only a thin line
between the horrible and the comic.'' The European history of laughter comes to an end. LETTERS. They are getting smaller and smaller in books these days. I imagine the death of literature: Bit by bit, without anyone noticing,
the type shrinks until it becomes utterly invisible. MACHO (and misogynist). The macho adores femaleness and wants to dominate what he adores. By glorifying the archetypal femaleness of the dominated woman (her motherhood, her fertility,
her frailty, her home-loving nature, her sentimentality, etc.), he glorifies his own virility. The misogynist, on the other hand, is repelled by femaleness; he flees women who are too womanly. The macho ideal: the family. The misogynist's
ideal: the bachelor with a great many mistresses; or: marriage to a beloved childless woman. MEDITATION. Three elementary possibilities for the novelist: he tells a story (Fielding), he describes a story (Flaubert), he thinks a story
(Musil). The 19th-century novel of description was in harmony with the (positivist, scientific) spirit of the time. To base a novel on a sustained meditation goes against the spirit of the 20th century, which no longer likes to think
at all. MESSAGE. Five years ago, a Scandinavian translator confessed to me that his publisher had wavered seriously over going ahead with ''The Farewell Party'': ''Everyone here is left-wing. They don't
like your message.'' ''What message?'' ''Isn't it a novel against abortion?'' Certainly not. Deep down, not only do I favor abortions, I'm for making them mandatory! Still,
I was delighted with this misunderstanding. I had succeeded as a novelist. I succeeded in maintaining the moral ambiguity of the situation. I had kept faith with the essence of the novel as an art: irony. And irony doesn't give
a damn about messages! MODERN (being modern). ''New, new, new is the star of Communism, and there is no modernity outside it,'' wrote the great Czech avant-garde novelist Vladislav Vancura around 1920. His whole
generation rushed to the Communist Party so as not to miss out on being modern. The historical decline of the Communist Party was sealed once it fell everywhere ''outside modernity.'' Because, as Rimbaud commanded,
''it is necessary to be absolutely modern.'' The desire to be modern is an archetype, that is, an irrational imperative, anchored deeply within us, a persistent form whose content is changeable and indeterminate:
what is modern is what declares itself modern and is accepted as such. Mrs. Youthful in Gombrowicz's ''Ferdydurke'' displays as one of the marks of modernity ''her casual way of heading for the toilet,
where till then people had gone in secret.'' ''Ferdydurke'': the most dazzling demythification of the archetype of the modern. NOVEL (and poetry). 1857: the greatest year of the century. ''Les
Fleurs du Mal'': lyric poetry discovers its rightful territory, its essence. ''Madame Bovary'': for the first time, a novel is ready to take on the highest requirements of poetry (the determination to
''seek beauty above all''; the importance of each particular word; the intense melody of the text; the imperative of originality applied to every detail). From 1857 on, the history of the novel will be that of the
''novel become poetry.'' But to take on the requirements of poetry is quite another thing from lyricizing the novel (forgoing its essential irony, turning away from the outside world, transforming the novel into
personal confession, weighing it down with ornament). The greatest of the ''novelists become poets'' are violently antilyrical: Flaubert, Joyce, Kafka, Gombrowicz. Novel - antilyrical poetry. NOVELIST (and writer).
I reread Sartre's short essay ''What Is Writing?'' Not once does he use the words ''novel'' or ''novelist.'' He only speaks of the ''prose writer.''
A proper distinction. The writer has original ideas and an inimitable voice. He may use any form (including the novel), and whatever he writes - being marked by his thought, borne by his voice - is part of his work. Rousseau, Goethe,
Chateaubriand, Gide, Malraux, Camus, Montherlant.

The novelist makes no great issue of his ideas. He is an explorer feeling his way in an effort to reveal some unknown aspect of existence. He is fascinated not by his voice but by a form he is seeking, and only those forms that meet the demands of his
dream become part of his work. Fielding, Sterne, Flaubert, Proust, Faulkner, Celine, Calvino.

The writer inscribes himself on the spiritual map of his time, of his country, on the map of the history of ideas.

The only context for grasping a novel's worth is the history of the European novel. The novelist need answer to no one but Cervantes. NOVELIST (and his life). Someone asks the novelist Karel Capek why he doesn't write poetry. His answer: ''Because
I loathe talking about myself.'' Hermann Broch on himself, on Musil, on Kafka: ''The three of us have no real biographies.'' Which is not to say that their lives were short on event, but that the lives
were not meant to be conspicuous, to be public, to become bio-graphy. ''I hate tampering with the precious lives of great writers, and no biographer will ever catch a glimpse of my private life,'' said Nabokov.
And Faulkner wished ''to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books.'' Overfamiliar metaphor: The novelist destroys the house of his life
and uses its stones to build the house of his novel. A novelist's biographers thus undo what a novelist has done, and redo what he undid. All their labor cannot illuminate either the value or the meaning of a novel, can scarcely
even identify a few of the bricks. The moment Kafka attracts more attention than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins. REWRITING. Interviews. Adaptations, transcriptions for the theater, for film, for television. Rewriting
as the spirit of the times. ''Someday all past culture will be completely rewritten and completely forgotten behind its rewrite'' (Introduction to ''Jacques and His Master''). And: ''Death
to all who dare rewrite what has been written! Impale them and roast them over a slow fire! Castrate them and cut off their ears!'' (The Master in ''Jacques and His Master''). RHYTHM. I hate to hear the
beat of my heart; it is a relentless reminder that the minutes of my life are numbered. So I have always seen something macabre in the bar lines that measure out a musical score. But the greatest masters of rhythm know how to silence
that monotonous and predictable regularity, and transform their music into a little enclave of ''time outside time.'' The masters of polyphony: contrapuntal, horizontal thinking weakens the importance of the measure.
In late Beethoven, the rhythm is so complicated, especially in the slow movements, that we can barely make out the bar lines. My admiration for Olivier Messiaen: with his technique of small rhythmic values added or subtracted, he invents
an unforeseeable and incalculable time structure, a completely autonomous time (a time from beyond ''the end of time,'' to quote the title of his quartet). A received idea: that the genius of rhythm is expressed
through noisy, emphatic regularity. False. The tedious rhythmic primitivism of rock: the heart's beat is amplified so that man can never for a moment forget his march toward death. SOVIET. An adjective I do not use. Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics: ''Four words, four lies'' (Cornelius Castoriadis). The Soviet people: a verbal screen behind which all the Russified nations of that empire are meant to be forgotten. The term ''Soviet''
suits not only the aggressive nationalism of Communist Greater Russia but also the national nostalgia of the dissidents. It allows them to believe that through a feat of magic, Russia (the real Russia) has been removed from the so-called
Soviet State and somehow survives as an intact, immaculate essence, free of all blame. The German conscience: traumatized, incriminated by the Nazi era; Thomas Mann: pitiless arraignment of the Germanic spirit. The ripest moment of
Polish culture: Gombrowicz joyously excoriating ''Polishness.'' Unthinkable for the Russians to excoriate ''Russianness,'' that immaculate essence. Not a Mann, not a Gombrowicz among them. TEMPS
MODERNES (Modern Era). The coming of Les Temps Modernes. The key moment of European history. In the 17th century, God becomes Deus absconditus and man the ground of all things. European individualism is born, and with it a new situation
for art, for culture, for science. I run into problems with this term in the United States. The literal translation, ''modern times'' (and even the more comprehensive ''Modern Era''), an American
takes to mean the contemporary moment, our century. The absence in America of the notion of Les Temps Modernes reveals the great chasm between the two continents. In Europe, we are living the end of the Modern Era: the end of individualism;
the end of art conceived as an irreplaceable expression of personal originality; the end that heralds an era of unparalleled uniformity. This sense of ending America does not feel, for America did not live through the birth of the
Modern Era and has only come along lately to inherit it. America has other criteria for beginnings and endings.
Excerpted from ''Sixty-three Words,'' a chapter in ''The Art of the Novel'' by MilanKundera, translated from the French original by Linda Asher, published
by Grove Press this month.